SC Lobbyists team up for “Mega-Awesome” proposal

Columbia — In a cost-cutting measure, some of South Carolina’s most influential lobbyists have combined forces to try to pass legislation that would create the world’s largest facility that would serve as a mall, a landfill, a private school funded by vouchers, and a check-cashing/payday lending service.

Some houses and/or cities may need to be relocated for the project.

Spokesmen for the project say that it will create thousands of jobs and save the state government millions of dollars allowing massive tax-cuts over the next decade. They also say that it will have a negative carbon footprint, actually extracting existing carbon dioxide from the air.

“It’s going to be Meg-a-mazing,” said Tom Jerrant, chuckling, who is serving as the head lobbyist for the project. “South Carolina needs all of the services this facility will provide, and that’s why we’re doing this — to help out our state in these hard economic times. Naysayers will say that the state has no shortage of landfill space, no compelling need for massive new retail development, more than enough payday lenders, and that most of our citizens are adamantly opposed to school vouchers, but we’ve researched this a lot and we’re pretty sure it’s a good idea.”

“We spent almost a whole meeting making sure that all this stuff was necessary, but that was the easy part,” Jerrant continued, “what really took the bulk of our time was coming up with a cool name. We thought about Super-Awesome-CheckMallSchoolFill, Taj-ma-Carolina, and Sanfordville… there were a bunch more really cool names too, but after a couple months of meetings, we settled on ‘Mega-Awesome’ largely because it’s going to be really big and really awesome.”

The group has settled on a proposed location northwest of Columbia.

“This place is going to be ginormous,” said Jerrant, “so we needed to find a lot of land. We’ve identified a tract of a few million acres in just the perfect spot. Coincidentally, it turns out that this particular tract spans five counties and three Congressional districts, and that was really lucky ’cause a bunch of legislators have jumped on board to support us.”

Few details were released about the logistics of the multi-modal facility, but speculation was that much of Lake Murray would become landfill, the mall would be built over that and schools and check-cashing storefronts would be located around the 100-mile perimeter.

Jerrant added that by combining forces, the various lobbies for landfills, school vouchers, mega-malls, and payday lenders, the taxpayers would be saving a fortune.

“Instead of each of us getting paid by various special interests,” Jerrant said, “we’ll instead take a collective 15% cut of the whole project cost and distribute it among ourselves. That’s savings that goes right to the bottom line.”